This pattern — agreement, return, violation, breakout — was not simply the behavior of an untrustworthy person, as some Army accounts implied.

It reflected the specific conditions on the reservation, which were often genuinely intolerable: inadequate food, disease, the presence of traditional enemies, the prohibition of traditional practices, arbitrary restrictions on movement.

When the conditions became bad enough, the calculation shifted: the risk of flight was preferable to the certainty of the situation on the reservation.

The 1886 surrender was different from the earlier ones in that the terms — exile in the east for two years, then return to Arizona — were specific and formally agreed to, and were then violated by the government.

The government’s violation of those terms, and the continued captivity that followed, produced in Geronimo’s later years a more focused awareness of what American promises meant in practice.